NoW editor: Max Mosley orgy had 'potential criminal flavour'

Wednesday 9 July 2008 09.26 EDT
First published on Wednesday 9 July 2008 09.26 EDT

The News of the World editor, Colin Myler, has today defended the paper's allegation that formula one boss Max Mosley engaged in a "sick Nazi orgy" with a "potential criminal flavour".

Defending his paper against Mosley's claim for invasion of privacy during cross-examination at the high court today, Myler said that the role play, which included the 68-year-old being caned until blood was drawn, did not just have a Nazi element to it, but also a "potential criminal flavour".

Cross-examining, Mosley's QC, James Price, said one would expect beatings at an S&M session.

Myler replied: "You say it was S&M but blood was drawn. I know it was drawn because he had a plaster on his bottom. I think it was after he'd had 15 beatings of the cane."

Price said the newspaper was accusing Mosley of "instigating a crime upon himself". "Are you serious?", he asked Myler.

The editor replied: "It is what Mr Mosley did. The News of the World did not take Mr Mosley kicking and screaming to that apartment, that flat in Chelsea. The News of the World did not engage five girls for five hours of what went on - which was brutal."

Myler also today admitted that his paper might not have been entirely fair to Mosley in its coverage of the "sick Nazi orgy" it claimed he had engaged in with five dominatrices earlier this year. The coverage included newspaper articles and a video of the alleged orgy on the News of the World website.

He agreed with the suggestion of the formula one boss's QC that "in fairness to Mr Mosley it might have been instructive to have had [the video of the orgy] translated by a German speaker".

"In fairness to Mr Mosley, we should have done that, but I still don't believe, in the context of ... what took place in the flat for five hours, that we didn't have a reasonable justification to publish what we did," the News of the World editor said.

Myler also admitted that no one with knowledge of German watched the video before the paper went to press. This was despite the fact that one of the scenarios featured in the video - which the paper claimed was recreating a concentration camp scene - was conducted mostly in German.

Myler himself said he had only watched brief snippets of the film before publication.

Price said that if the paper had bothered to get the video watched by someone with German-language skills, they would have realised that the scenario being acted out was very clearly of a prison, and not a concentration camp. "There were references to prison cells and life sentences," Price added.

The court had previously heard that Mosley is fluent in German, and one of the women, known only as Woman B, is a native speaker.

Price also asked Myler why the News of the World's informant, another dominatrix known in court only as Woman E, was never paid the £25,000 she was originally promised by the paper's chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, for secretly filming the gathering.

"Every fee is renegotiated," said Myler. He refuted Price's suggestion that the reason Woman E did not receive the full fee was because she failed to provide the paper with "unmistakable" evidence of Nazism.

"We negotiate just as in any other business deal. We are in a credit crunch, Mr Price," he added.

Myler also denied Price's suggestion that he wanted "intimate pictures of sex". "No, I didn't - not at all. We wouldn't have published intimate pictures of sex either in the paper or on the website - and we didn't," he said.

The News of the World editor claimed he based his conclusion that there was a Nazi element to the gathering based on his knowledge of general history and the connotations of the role play - the striped prison camp uniforms, the medical inspection and the use of German.

Myler said he believed head inspections took place in the Nazi death camps and that people were shaved.

Price asked: "Did they have their bottoms shaved as far as you know?"

"I don't know," said Myler, adding that he was not a historian. "We felt that what we saw, what we witnessed, was on balance a fair and reasonable interpretation of Nazi-style role play," he added.

Myler admitted he was surprised to discover that his reporter had not obtained a signed statement from Woman E before printing her story.

He said he decided not to give Mosley a right to reply for three reasons: that he was convinced there was evidence of Nazism; that Mosley might go to another newspaper and allow them to print a "spoiler"; and because he might apply for, and win, an injunction against publication.

When asked whether he seriously thought that Mosley, already facing a "gross invasion of privacy", would really tell all to another paper just to spite the News of the World, Myler said: "Yes, it has happened in the past."

He added: "When an individual knows that something is coming out in a newspaper, they go to another newspaper to put across a totally different story."

NoW reporter Neville Thurlbeck is due in the witness box this afternoon.

The case continues.

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